Music that moves you

Ain't Life Grand? Well…mostly.

All is lost. Liana told me that she is giving up music. Turns out that the hard work of making a career of the music biz wasn’t for her. But she is in Hollywood and has dreams so big that they don’t fit in this universe, so I forgive her.

I, on the other hand, have manageable dreams. The kind that I can taste, if only I was willing to put in the work to reach them.

But I know that my dreams of rock stardom will not be satisfying. Even if I became the most famous musician in Minneapolis history, I would still go home to my 4 cats and my lovely girlfriend and lead an utterly amazing and downright normal life off the stage.

Life is grand. But it can’t keep up with those fleeting moments of triumph on the stage.

The greatest moment of my life was hitting a jump shot at the first-half buzzer in a varsity high school basketball game against Stillman Valley. I lost control of my emotions and jumped so high in the air that I might as well have hit my head on the gym ceiling. It wasn’t a big shot in the grand scheme of things, but I was in the midst of the greatest game of my career. The crowd was pumping along with the cells in my body, which for reason unknown to me, had conspired to give me a temporary shooting hand that the comes around once in a lifetime.

Sometimes being on stage is something like that. But it doesn’t quite make it there. At best, it is a tamed-down version of that jump shot.

I can relate to drug addicts who are continually seeking the next fix. I don’t do drugs – never have – but I do seek out that next fix. I call it art sometimes. And sometimes I call it performance. It is a mix of the two. I am in search of the perfect mix of performance, art, energy, and crowd. I am on constant watch for it all coming together. For all my cells to decide to do something special for a brief moment in time. To push me to that promised land once again.